You could consider doing a form of NAND to Tetris: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nandgame.com/ https://www.nandgame.co

You could consider doing a form of NAND to Tetris: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nandgame.com/ https://www.nandgame.com/ (The NAND Game is having you build the same stuff as NAND to Tetris, but you do it visually as circuit block diagrams, rather than writing a textual description of how the circuits would connect up. It also doesn't include the elaborate details of why you're building each thing, although since it's the same content and sequence as NAND to Tetris, you could read the book or listen to lectures while doing the NAND game to get more context.) Alternatively, read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. A very bit-oriented book! These suggestions might be controversial because they start bottom-up rather than top-down -- they're not really asking "how does the stuff that you already use work at a lower level?" but more like "suppose that we had logic circuits and math; what could we do with those that would eventually allow us to have computer systems?". Some people might advocate trying to find a way to experiment with things that are more closely connected to what you already do with computer programming. Alternatively, you could do some kind of cryptography class or tutorial, as those extensively use bitwise operations (although the only one that is likely to be explained is XOR, because XOR mixes two bit sequences in a reversible way, which makes it natural for use in encryption and decryption).